Psychic And Spiritual Experiences, Health, Well-Being, and Meaning in Life

 

J.E. Kennedy, H. Kanthamani,  and  John Palmer

 

Original publication and copyright: The Journal of Parapsychology, 1994, Vol. 58, pp. 353-383.

 

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ABSTRACT: This screening survey of college students found that 59% of the 105 respondents indicated that they had experienced a psychic and/or transcendent/spiritual experience.  Those reporting these anomalous experiences tended to have a greater overall sense of meaning in life.  Among different factors that can give life meaning and purpose, expressing artistic creativity and observing spiritual beliefs were positively related to reports of anomalous experiences, whereas obtaining wealth was negatively related.  The survey also confirmed that scales for absorption and temporal lobe symptoms correlate positively with each other and with reports of anomalous experiences.  The pattern of correlations among well-being measures, anomalous experiences, and other variables was consistent with previous studies with college students but was different than previous results with nonstudent adults.  Research on the relationship between religion and mental health has found similar positive relationships for adult populations and mixed results for college students. 

Very few respondents considered their anomalous experiences detrimental, and 91% of those reporting transcendent experiences and 46% of those reporting psychic experiences considered them valuable.

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Investigators in the rapidly growing field of mind-body medicine are encountering findings that suggest an attitude of openness to paranormal experiences may be conducive to health and well-being.  For example, Joan Borysenko, co-founder of the Mind/Body Clinic at Harvard Medical School, reports that an encounter with an apparently psychic person in an airport, followed by a series of past-life regression experiences, helped her overcome a serious psychological problem that extensive therapy had failed to resolve (Borysenko, 1993).  She notes that her experiences do not provide scientific evidence for the reality of past lives, but they do provide evidence that anomalous experiences can help some people overcome difficult psychological problems.  Likewise, heart disease researcher Dean Ornish believes that "opening your heart" to "experience a higher force" is an important component of his program for reversing heart disease (Ornish, 1990, Chapter 9).  Although Ornish discusses Byrd's (1988) study of the apparent paranormal effect of prayer on heart patients, his primary focus is that this attitude of openness reduces adverse physiological reactions to stressful situations.  Here too, tangible benefits are found without needing to resolve the issue of the reality of the "higher forces."

 

The parapsychological literature provides surprisingly little information on the relation between parapsychological experiences and health measures.  Research to-date has focused on belief in paranormal phenomena (reviewed by Irwin, 1993) rather than on the effects of psi experiences.  Further, the available research focuses on the extremes of the belief/disbelief polarity, while the mind-body approaches noted in the previous paragraph suggest that attitudes of "don't know" or "doesn't matter" may be more interesting for health research.  Several researchers, particularly White (1990) and Blackmore (1988), have called for increased research on the effects of paranormal experiences on peoples' lives.  Milton (1992) reported a small initial survey of how psychic experiences affected peoples' lives.

 

The study reported here is the initial step of a larger project to investigate the effects that psi and other unusual experiences have on people's lives, particularly on their health and well-being.  This first step was a screening survey intended (a) to collect some basic cross-sectional information about anomalous experiences and health-related measures, and (b) to find people for further investigation. 

 

Before describing the study, various health related measures that may be unfamiliar to parapsychologists are briefly summarized, along with relevant findings from the literature on anomalous experiences.  The definitions and questionnaires used to measure psychic, paranormal, mystical, and related experiences have varied widely in previous research, with the terms paranormal and mystical often including both psychic and mystical/spiritual experiences.  The small number of relevant studies prevents meaningful comparisons of different questionnaires.  When possible in the following summary, we report research findings for psychic experiences and mystical experiences separately.  The mystical experience category includes experiences described as mystical, spiritual, religious, or transcendent. 

 

All of the following studies that report relationships between psychic or mystical experiences and other measures are based on cross-sectional correlations using self-reports of previous experiences.  The longitudinal research that would allow more useful and convincing understanding has not been done.

 

BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW

 

Well-Being

Well-being is the basis for quality-of-life measures that are becoming widely used in health research (Spilker, 1990; Stewart & Ware, 1992).  Well-being includes a cognitive component (life satisfaction) and an emotional component (positive affect) and is a global assessment of all aspects of a person's life (Diener, 1984).  Unfortunately, researchers use inconsistent terminology in well-being research.  Some investigators emphasize the cognitive component (life satisfaction) and others emphasize the affective component.  Some researchers include the absence of negative affect in their definition of well-being, others include only the presence of positive affect.  Numerous questionnaires are available to measure well-being and quality of life.

 

The studies that investigated well-being measures and psi experiences have found that people with psi experiences are in the normal range of well-being and have a tendency to report more extreme positive and negative feelings than others.  Greeley (1975) reported a national survey of 1,460 people that included the Bradburn Affect Scale, which has scales for positive and negative affect, as well as the balance of the two (which Bradburn calls well-being).  Psychic experiences were positively correlated with both positive and negative affect separately, but were not correlated with the balance.  Haraldsson and Houtkooper (1991) reported an identical pattern in a representative survey of 18,607 people in 13 countries that also included the Bradburn Affect Scale.  Using the Tellegen Differential Personality Inventory, Nelson (1990) also found that people with psychic experiences scored higher on both the positive and negative affectivity personality factors than those without psychic experiences.[1]  Gabbard and Twemlow (1984) administered a well-being scale (from the Profiles of Adaption to Life questionnaire) to people reporting out-of-body experiences (OBEs) as well as to five control groups.  They concluded that people reporting OBE's were "average healthy Americans." 

 

People reporting mystical experiences also tend to report more positive feelings than others but, contrary to the findings with psychic experiences, not more negative feelings.  Greeley (1975) found mystical experiences were positively related to positive affect, but negatively related to negative affect on the Bradburn Scale.  Likewise, Nelson (1990) found that mystical experiences were associated with positive affectivity, but also with less negative affectivity than for psychic experiences.  Consistent with these results, both Greeley (1975) and Hay and Morisy (1978) found that the balance of positive and negative affect (well-being) on the Bradburn scale correlated positively with mystical experiences.  Greeley (1975) also found life satisfaction positively correlated with mystical experiences, and Kass, Friedman, Leserman, Zuttermeister, and Benson (1991) found that spiritual experiences and beliefs were positively correlated with life purpose and satisfaction.  A positive relation between positive affect and mystical experience may not be surprising given that intense positive affect is often considered one of the defining characteristics of mystical experience (Noble, 1987; Spilka, Hood, & Gorsuch, 1985, p. 176).

 

  On the other hand, Thalbourne and Delin (1994) proposed that reports of mystical experiences would correlate with past, but not necessarily current or recent states of depression.  This hypothesis was based on biographical accounts that initial mystical experiences may be followed by a period of depression.  They reported that mystical experiences correlated with past depressive and manic-depressive experiences in a sample of college students, and with past manic-depressive experiences in samples of patients recovered from schizophrenia or manic-depression.  However, they also note that because they did not ascertain whether the mystical or depression experiences occurred first, the causal mechanisms for the correlations are uncertain.

 

In general, the relationship between positive and negative affect measures depends on the details of the questions.  Diener (1984) concluded from his literature review that, across persons, positive and negative affect during a period of time are: (a) positively correlated when measured with scales that assess intensity of affective state without considering the frequency or duration of the states;  (b) negatively correlated when measured with scales that assess amount of time in positive and negative affective states without considering the intensity of the states; and (c) unrelated when measured with scales that assess average positive and negative affect (considering both intensity and time), and when measured with older scales such as the Bradburn Affect Scale, which are ambiguous or mixed on the intensity/time dimensions.  The Bradburn Affect scale simply asks if a certain feeling occurred in the past few weeks, without specifying how intense or how often the feeling occurred.  More recent well-being scales usually include the time dimension.

 

Meaning in Life

Several investigators propose that meaning in life plays an important role in protecting against adverse health effects from stress, as well as providing direction and fulfillment in life (e.g., Antonovsky, 1987; Kobasa, 1979; Wortman, Silver, & Kressler, 1993).  The term meaning in life indicates that a person is committed to a concept, framework, or set of values that (a) makes life understandable, (b) offers goals to attain, and (c) provides fulfillment (Battista & Almond, 1973).  Meaning-in-life scales include the Purpose in Life test (Crumbaugh & Maholick, 1964), the Sense of Coherence Scale (Antonovsky, 1987), and the Life Regard Index (Battista & Almond, 1973).  These scales strongly correlate with well-being for adults (rs of about .50 to .75) (Zika & Chamberlain, 1992). 

 

The question of why people have high or low meaning in life has rarely been investigated.  The scales used to measure the degree of self-reported meaning in life do not ask what factors make life meaningful.  Also, low meaning in life may be due to not finding a concept, framework, or set of values, or it may be due to not attaining the goals that offer fulfillment or life satisfaction.  This distinction has been recognized but rarely investigated (Battista & Almond, 1973; Dufton & Perlman, 1986).  The possibility that people choose a meaning in life with unrealistic goals that lead to low life satisfaction particularly merits investigation.

 

Wortman, Silver, and Kresler (1993) suggest that the system of beliefs, assumptions, and expectations that provide a sense of coherence and meaning may explain the great variability in how people adjust to personal tragedies.  Some individuals adjust quickly and others never adjust.  Most people try to find meaning for a personal tragedy.  A few examples from this diverse literature include cancer patients (Taylor, 1983), parents of children with cancer (Chodoff, Friedman, & Hamburg, 1964), paralyzed accident victims (Bulman & Wortman, 1977), and adults who experienced incest as children (Silver, Boon, & Stones, 1983). 

 

Near-death experiences are well known to increase a person's sense of meaning in life (Gallup, 1982; Greyson & Stevenson, 1980; Ring, 1984)[2].  Although Ring (1984) notes that other types of paranormal or anomalous experiences can sometimes have similar effects, meaning in life has received very little attention for other types of anomalous experiences.  Life meaning or purpose has been found positively related to spiritual experiences and beliefs (Kass, et al., 1991) and peak experiences (Wuthnow, 1978).

Self-Rated Health

A person's simple subjective rating of his or her overall health generally predicts future health and survival about as well or better than a physician's evaluation.  This outcome has been found in numerous studies (e.g., Idler & Kasl, 1991; Kaplan & Camacho, 1983).  The average correlation between well-being and self-rated health was .35 for 158 studies in a meta-analysis by Okun, Stock, Haring, and Witter (1984).  We know of no studies of paranormal or mystical experiences that included a self-rated health item.

 

Healthy Lifestyle

A person's health is greatly affected by lifestyle factors including nutrition, exercise, stress management, and social support.  Health and wellness programs are increasingly becoming integrated lifestyle programs (e.g., Ornish, 1990).  

 

Gabbard and Twemlow (1984) included the lifestyle factors  alcohol/drug abuse and interpersonal relationships in their OBE survey and concluded that the OBE group was consistent with normal Americans.

 

Several studies have found paranormal or mystical experiences correlated with possible symptoms of temporal lobe dysfunction (reviewed in Neppe, 1990).  Neppe (1983) and Persinger (1983; 1984) both developed and used questionnaires based on symptoms associated with temporal lobe epilepsy or with direct stimulation of the temporal lobes during surgery.  Persinger found correlations of .50 to .72 between number of paranormal or religious experiences and his temporal lobe symptoms scale (Persinger, 1984; Persinger & Makarec, 1987; Persinger & Valliant, 1985).  Neppe (1990) concluded that temporal lobe functioning may be one of several cerebral mechanisms for paranormal experiences.

 

Persinger and Makarec (1987) found that Persinger's temporal lobe symptoms scale correlated negatively with well-being (two groups with r=-.60 and -.50),[3]  which is surprising given the studies noted above that generally found either positive or zero correlations between anomalous experiences and well-being measures (depending on the type of experience and definition of well-being).  The reasons for these seemingly disparate results need further investigation.  Persinger and Makarec also reported that the temporal lobe symptoms scale correlates positively with anxiety and with several unfavorable scales on the MMPI.  In a later report, Persinger and Makarec (1993) suggest that mild elevations of the temporal lobe symptoms may be "associated with benign or even desirable (creative) consequences" (p. 42), but moderate to severe elevations may indicate the need for clinical treatment.

 

Absorption is a closely related construct that consistently correlates with paranormal and mystical experiences.  In developing this construct and scale, Tellegen focused on a person's tendency to have episodes of total attention devoted to imagination or imaginative enhancement of experience (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974; reviewed in Roche & McConkey, 1990).  Positive correlations between absorption and self-reported psychic experiences were reported by Nadon and Kihlstrom (1987, r=.51), Glicksohn (1990, r=.25), and Irwin (1985, p. 290).  Absorption was significantly higher for OBE experients in several studies by Irwin (1985, pp. 281-284) and a study by Myers, Austrin, Grisso, and Nickeson (1983), but not in two other studies (Gabbard & Twemlow, 1984; Spanos & Moretti, 1988).  Gabbard and Twemlow (1984) found significantly higher absorption scores for near-death experients than for other OBE experients.  Combined mystical and psychic experiences correlated about r=.6 with absorption in Nelson's (1989) study[4].  The correlations between mystical experiences and absorption were .53 for Spanos and Moretti (1988) and .46 for deGroot, Gwynn, and Spanos (1988).  The construct fantasy-proneness is closely related to, and perhaps indistinguishable from, absorption (Rhue & Lynn, 1989).  Wilson and Barber (1983), who developed the construct, reported that the overwhelming majority of high fantasy-prone individuals reported paranormal experiences. 

 

Temporal lobe symptom and absorption scales are closely related.  The measurement scales for both constructs use relatively similar experiences of imagination or fantasy.  Temporal lobe symptoms have been found to correlate r=.59 with absorption (Spanos, Arango, & deGroot) and r=.64 with fantasy proneness (Persinger & DeSano, 1986).

 

Absorption and temporal lobe symptoms both appear to be highly susceptible to, and possibly dominated by, experimental demand characteristics or experimenter expectations.  Although many studies have found absorption significantly related to hypnotizability (reviewed in Roche & McConkey, 1990), recent research indicates that this relationship depends on the subjects knowing that the experimenters are interested in this hypothesis (Council, Kirsch, & Hafner, 1986; Drake, Nash, & Cawood, 1991; Spanos, Arango, & deGroot, 1993).  Likewise, although Persinger and DeSano (1986) reported that temporal lobe symptoms correlated with hypnotizability, Spanos, Arango, and deGroot (1993) found a nonsignificant correlation when subjects did not know that the experimenters were interested in this hypothesis.  Note that in the study by Spanos, Arango, and deGroot, for both absorption and temporal lobe symptoms: (a) significant correlations with hypnotizability measures were found in a condition with demand characteristics (rs of .31 to .51), (b) nonsignificant correlations were found in a condition without the demand characteristics, (c) the difference between conditions was statistically significant, and (d) the demand characteristics must have influenced responses on the absorption and temporal lobes symptoms scales because the hypnotizability test was given prior to recruiting and randomizing subjects to one of the two demand characteristics conditions for these scales.  These results obviously have significant implications for any research with these scales.

 

Bidirectional Causation and Nonlinear Effects

Health research in general is complicated by bidirectional or reciprocal causation between health and various types of experiences.  For example, exercise affects health, but health status affects exercise capacity.  Likewise, physical health can affect psychological well-being, but psychological well-being can affect physical health.  Prolonged or chronic stress may depress a person's sense of well-being, which then leads to more adverse physical reactions to the stress, which further depresses the sense of well-being, so on.

 

The usual results of this bidirectional causation are that (a) experiences are beneficial or benign in a certain range of intensity and duration but detrimental outside that range, and (b) the range of acceptable intensity depends on individual differences and changes as a result of adaption or conditioning.  For example, Wortman, Sheedy, Gluhoski, and Kressler (1990) concluded that people who are the most successful at coping with day-do-day challenges often become the most devastated when a personal tragedy overwhelms their coping mechanisms.  These types of nonlinear effects are the norm in health research.  Even relaxation and meditation can be practiced to excess (Carrington, 1993).

 

Research on the effects of anomalous experiences must recognize the likelihood of both beneficial and detrimental effects that vary with experience.  An enthusiast who focuses only on the beneficial effects and a skeptic who focuses only on the detrimental effects would both be remiss.  Researchers must ultimately look beyond simple summary statistics such as means and correlation coefficients to investigate the full range of effects.

 

METHODS

 

Questionnaire

A major design parameter for this screening study was to use a short questionnaire -- which required that short scales be used for the various constructs.  Because we were primarily interested in identifying relatively large effects in this study, the low reliability of short scales was not a major limitation.  Of course, with low reliability, the observed correlations can be expected to underestimate the actual relationship between constructs.

 

Well-Being/Mental Health.  The 5-item mental health screening test from the Medical Outcomes Study was used to measure well-being (Berwick, et al., 1991; Stewart, Ware, Sherbourne, & Wells, 1992).  This scale focuses on positive and negative affect and only indirectly considers life satisfaction.  We followed the terminology of the scale developers in calling the overall scale a mental health scale.  (They refer to the positive affect subscale as well-being.)  The scale has two positive affect items and three negative affect items, which make separate subscales.  To make an equal number of positive and negative items, we added the item that had the next highest factor loading for positive affect in the larger inventory from which the five-items were derived (Veit and Ware, 1983).  This is the first item in Part A of our Life Experiences Quesionnnaire in the Appendix.

 

We followed the established scoring method that assigns the lowest numerical value to the most healthy response for each item.  Negative items are reversed scored, so that in low scores indicate better health.  Each of the six response options is given an integer number from 1 to 6.  The overall mental health score is obtained by adding all six items.  Positive affect and negative affect scores are obtained by adding the scores for the three relevant items in each subscale.

 

Because the items ask how much time the respondent had various feelings, the positive and negative affect subscales are correlated -- unlike the Bradburn and Tellegen scales mentioned in the introduction.  Also, because the negative affect items are reverse scored, the correlation between positive and negative affect is positive.

 

Self-Rated Health.  We included a basic self-rated health question taken from Ware and Shearbourne (1992) that asked the person to rate his or her general health (Question 3 in Part A of the questionnaire).  The five response options were scored as integers from 1 (for excellent) to 5 (for poor).  Consistent with the mental health scale above, low scores indicated better health.

 

Healthy Lifestyle.  Five lifestyle questions were used to make a simple healthy lifestyle scale.  We developed these questions because we found no suitably short lifestyle scale in the literature.  The lifestyle items are Questions 6 through 10 in the Appendix.  Each question was scored with a 1 for the more healthy response and 2 for the less healthy response.  The four response options in Question 10 were scored by combining the top two and bottom two options.  Question 9 on being angry or very irritated on most days is based on the recent thinking that hostility is the "toxic" component of type A behavior (Booth-Kewley & Friedman, 1987; Williams, 1993). 

 

Meaning in Life.  Question 11 on Part A is a basic, global meaning-in-life item similar to those used on multi-item questionnaires.  The four response options were scored as integers with 1 for "very much" meaning and 4 for "no" meaning.  This scoring gives a positive correlation between higher meaning in life and better health scores.  In an extension of the usual meaning-in-life inquiry, Question 12 asked if the respondent was satisfied with his or her meaning in life.  This item was scored 1 for satisfied and 2 for not satisfied.

 

Question 2 contains 10 items that are factors that could contribute to a person's sense of meaning in life.  This further extension of the meaning-in-life issue was developed for this project based on categories of values and meaning discussed by Reker and Wong (1988) in their review.  We found no existing questionnaire that addressed the issue of what gives a person a sense of meaning in life.  The items include obtain wealth, express artistic or literary creativity, and observe spiritual or religious beliefs, and were scored as integers with 1 for extremely important purpose of life to 5 for not at all a purpose of life.

 

Transcendent and Psychic Experiences.  Questions 13 and 16 asked if the respondent has had transcendent and psychic experiences (coded 1 for yes and 2 for no).  Following each of these questions, the respondent answered one of two questions that asked for a global evaluation of how the experience affected the respondent or would affect the respondent if s/he has not had an experience.  The five response options ranged from Very valuable to Very disruptive. 

 

Temporal Lobe Symptoms.  Seven of the items in Part B of the questionnaire are from Persinger's temporal lobes symptoms scale.  We used only part of the items from the scale because of space limitations, and because we were concerned that the unusual experiences in Persinger's scale, and particularly the buffer items, would establish strong demand characteristics that we expect psychic and transcendent experiences to be associated with bizarre and possibly disturbing perceptual and sensory experiences.  Using a correlation matrix provided by Persinger[5] for 1,211 cases for the full scale, we used stepwise multiple regression to select the seven items that gave the best prediction of the full 16 items (r=.92).  For the 1,211 cases, Cronbach's alpha reliability was .73 for the full scale and .65 for the seven-item short scale.  The temporal lobe items are Questions 3, 5, 8, 12, 14, 17, and 20 on Part B of the questionnaire.  Following Persinger, we took the percentage of the 7 items that were marked T (true) and assigned this as the temporal lobe score.  The temporal lobe score was set to a missing value if more than one item was missing.  When used for correlations, the temporal lobe symptoms scores were made negative to be consistent with the other scales above and give a positive correlation between more temporal lobe symptoms and better health. 

 

Question 5 asked if the respondent had ever been diagnosed with epileptic symptoms.  Because no one answered yes, this question will not be discussed further.

 

Absorption.  The remaining 14 items in Part B of the questionnaire are from the 37-item Tellegen and Atkinson (1974) absorption scale.  The items were selected using stepwise multiple regression on 315 cases that had previously been collected as part of parapsychological experiments.  The 315 cases consisted of 232 American high school students, 13 American technical school students, and 70 female college students at an English-speaking college in India.  For all cases, the absorption scale was given in a group setting after a talk on parapsychology and an ESP test.  The 14 items predicted the score for the full 37 items with r=.94. For the 315 cases, Cronbach's alpha was .86 for the full scale and .73 for the 14-item short scale.  The overall absorption score was the percent of the 14 items marked T, which allows easy comparison with other results but differs from the usual method of just counting the number of items marked T.  The absorption score was set to a missing value if more than two items were missing.  When used with correlations, the absorption score was set negative to be consistent with the other scales above and to give a positive correlation between more absorption and better health. 

 

Subjects

The questionnaires were mailed to 500 Duke University students whose names were obtained by randomly selecting a page, column, and line from the student directory.  Foreign students and graduate students were included.  The package included an addressed, postage-paid return envelope. 

 

Hypotheses and Data Analysis

For the planned analyses, psychic and transcendent experiences were combined into one binary variable called anomalous experiences (coded as 1 if the respondent reported a psychic and/or transcendent experience and 2 if both experience questions were marked no).  The hypotheses for this study were divided into three categories: confirmatory hypotheses, planned exploratory hypotheses, and post hoc analyses. 

 

Three confirmatory hypotheses were based on findings from previous research.  These hypotheses were: (a) Absorption would correlate with anomalous experiences; (b) temporal lobe symptoms would correlate with anomalous experiences; and (c) absorption would correlate with temporal lobe symptoms.  The significance level was set at .05 two tailed for these analyses, without correction for multiple analyses.  As noted above, scores for temporal lobe symptoms and absorption were made negative for these correlations to be consistent with the scoring system used for the experiences and health related measures.

 

Four planned exploratory analyses were based on hypotheses that did not have a clear precedent from previous research (given our knowledge of the literature at that time).  These hypotheses were that anomalous experiences would correlate with (a) mental health (well-being), (b) self-reported health, (c) healthy lifestyle, and (d) meaning in life.  The significance level was set at .01 two tailed for these analyses to adjust for multiple analyses.

 

   Post hoc analyses investigated a variety of effects that may give suggestions for future research.  These analyses included (a) examining the psychic and transcendent experiences separately, (b) investigating the effects of the different categories of meaning in life, and (c) examining the relationships between various other measures.  The post hoc analyses used two-tailed tests and are reported without correction for multiple analyses.

 

Pearson correlations were used for statistical analyses because this gives a useful effect size measure as well as statistical significance.  Randomization tests with 10,000 permutations (Edgington, 1987) were done for the key correlations to verify that skewed distributions and the discrete nature of the data did not distort the results.  The randomization tests gave significance levels very close to the usual Pearson correlation results that are reported here.  The data were entered by two different people and the discrepancies resolved before analyses.

 

RESULTS

 

Completed questionnaires were received from 105 respondents by the cutoff date.  This return rate of 21% limits the generalizability of the results.  However, recognizing that the study population consists of students who are sufficiently motivated to fill out the questionnaire, the data allow comparisons between those who report experiences and those who do not report experiences.  As discussed later, the use of college students is probably a greater limitation for generalizing the results than the fact that only a subset of students responded. 

 

The respondents were 54% female.  The mean age was 23 and ranged from 17 to 47, with 43% aged 20 or less and 90% aged 30 or less.  Ethnic origin or race was 85% white, 7% black, and 7% Asian.

 

Of the 105 respondents, 62 (59%) reported one or both types of anomalous experiences and 43 (41%) reported neither.  Of the 62 respondents reporting anomalous experiences, 18 respondents reported only a psychic experience, 19 reported only a transcendent experience, and 25 reported both types.  Thus, 41% of all respondents reported psychic experiences and 42% reported transcendent experiences.

 

The 41% of respondents reporting psychic experiences is lower than the 50 to 60% found in other surveys of U.S. college students (McClenon, 1993; Palmer, 1979).  Although these differences may be due to different survey methods, they do suggest that the present sample is not strongly biased by those with experiences.  The 42% of students reporting a transcendent experience compares with 35% reported by Palmer (1979) and 36% by Myers et al. (1983) for a relatively similar question with U.S. college students.

 

The mean temporal lobe score was 32% of the items marked true, which is consistent with the values reported by Persinger and Makarec (1987) for the full scale with college students.  The mean absorption score was 51% of items marked true, whereas the studies reviewed above that reported mean scores found over 60% (and sometimes over 70%) of the items on the full scale marked true for American or Canadian college students (Council, Kirsch, & Hafner, 1986; deGroot, Gwynn, & Spanos, 1988; Drake, Nash, & Cawood, 1991; Myers, et al., 1983)[6] and 54% to 60% of the items marked true for Australian college students (Irwin, 1985).  Cronbach's alpha reliability was .59 for temporal lobes symptoms, .70 for absorption, and .79 for the mental health scale.

 

Planned Analyses

All three planned confirmatory analyses were significant, as shown in Table 1.  The correlation between anomalous experiences and absorption (r=.44) is consistent with the findings from previous studies.  Likewise, the correlation between absorption and temporal lobe symptoms (r=.52) is close to the value (r=.59) reported by Spanos, Arango, and deGroot (1993).  The correlation between temporal lobe symptoms and anomalous experiences (r=.35) was lower than the values of .50 to .72 reported by Persinger.  This difference could be due to a variety of factors including experimental demand characteristics as well as his use of the full temporal lobe symptoms scale and a multiple item scale for paranormal experiences.

 

As shown in Table 1, of the four planned exploratory analyses, only meaning in life was significantly correlated with reporting an anomalous experience (r=.31).  Respondents reporting experiences tended to have a greater sense of meaning in life.

 

 

 

Post Hoc Analyses

The correlation matrix for the main variables and each type of experience are shown in Table 2.  In evaluating these results, it may be useful to remember that these correlations can be expected to underestimate the true relationships between variables because of the low reliability of the short scales used in this questionnaire.  Key points from the table include:

 

1. Psychic and transcendent experiences separately were significantly correlated with absorption, temporal lobe symptoms, and meaning in life.

 

2. Both the temporal lobe symptoms and absorption scores tended to be negatively correlated with the health measures (poorer health scores with more absorption and more temporal lobe symptoms).  The strongest correlations were with negative affect.  The correlations were slightly, but consistently higher for temporal lobe symptoms than for absorption.

 

3. The three experience indicators were not correlated with the health measures, with the exception that persons reporting psychic experiences tended to report less healthy lifestyles (r=-.26, p=.009).  In particular, positive and negative affect were not correlated with psychic or transcendent experiences.

 

4. Consistent with previous research, reports of transcendent and psychic experiences were positively correlated.

 

5. The various health related measures tended to have moderate intercorrelations as expected.  In particular, meaning in life was positively correlated with self-rated health and positive affect.

 

 

 

 

 

The correlations in Table 2 remained significant and generally changed only slightly when the items that might be paranormal experiences were removed from the temporal lobe symptoms and absorption scales.  (These items were Question 17 for the temporal lobes symptoms and Questions 4, 10, and 16 for absorption.)

 

The sex of the respondent was not related to any of the three experience indicators or to absorption or temporal lobes symptoms.  Males did tend to report better mental health (r=.24, p=.01), more positive affect (r=.24, p=.01), and more interest in obtaining status and recognition (r=.24, p=.01) than females.

 

Of the different factors potentially giving life meaning, obtaining wealth was negatively related to anomalous experiences, while expressing artistic creativity and observing spiritual beliefs were positively related with experiences.  The pattern of correlations for these factors is shown in Table 3.  Respondents who placed importance on expressing artistic creativity tended to report (a) more psychic experiences, (b) higher absorption and temporal lobe symptoms, (b) poorer health scores, and (c) poorer health scores, and (d) an interest in helping others.  Respondents who placed importance on observing spiritual or religious beliefs tended to report (a) substantially more transcendent experiences, (b) higher absorption but not temporal lobes symptoms, (c) a healthy lifestyle, (d) an interest in helping others, and (e) low interest in obtaining status.  Those interested in obtaining wealth tended to report (a) fewer psychic and transcendent experiences, (b) more interest in enjoying pleasure, (c) a strong interest in obtaining status and recognition, and (d) suggestively low scores on absorption and on interest in altruism.